Lansing kaba biography of barack

One week.

That's all the time it took for Khaliku Kaba, 34, of Lansing, to raise $8,500 and change thousands of lives.

Born in a Ugandan refugee camp, Kaba grew up between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, fleeing multiple civil wars.

He was separated from his parents as a baby and from his adoptive family as a teenager, moving to Lansing in 2008 as part of a U.N. refugee resettlement program. He's lived here since, working as a preschool bus driver and part-time at Meijer.

On a 2019 trip to Uganda, he visited his birthplace, Rhino camp, which is home to nearly 200,000 refugees of the South Sudanese Civil War.

What he saw troubled him: The sole hand-drawn well in the village where he grew up was broken, leaving residents to drink from dirty streams and rely on water trucked in by nongovernmental organizations.

After drinking from a water source on his 2019 trip, Kaba contracted typhoid fever and dysentery.